NeXtMidas was designed by Jeff Schoen who had been one of the primary developers
of X-Midas.
NeXtMidas borrows a lot of the design features from X-Midas.
NeXtMidas incorporates the "lessons learned" from years of
X-Midas development.
At times NeXtMidas sacrifices Object-Oriented design to be "X-Midas'ish".
This makes it easier for X-Midas users to transition to NeXtMidas.
This also facilitates interoperability with X-Midas.
Prior to the release of NeXtMidas 2.0.0 in May 2005, NeXtMidas was required to be
Java 1.1-compatible (even though Java 5 had already been released).
This was a customer requirement due to continued use of Netscape 4.7 (which was
used to run some NeXtMidas applets).
This restriction played a major role in many design decisions.
NeXtMidas had to use AWT rather than Swing.
NeXtMidas could not use Java's New-IO (NIO) package.
NeXtMidas could only use a subset of the Java Collections Framework (this
is why NeXtMidas has its own Table and KeyVector classes).
New versions of NeXtMidas generally support Java versions that Sun Microsystems
support at the time of the NeXtMidas release. Usually this is the current
version of Java plus two back versions.
As of August 2010, NeXtMidas 2.8.2 will run on...
Java 6 <-- Current Version
Java 5 <-- 1st Back Version
Java 1.4.2 <-- 2nd Back Version (only supported under NeXtMidas 2.6.x and prior)
When Java 7 is released, later versions of NeXtMidas will add support for it.
This policy parallels Sun Microsystem's policy for supported Java versions.
This gives the customer several years to upgrade systems before they need to
upgrade NeXtMidas's single dependency, Java.